Yun, I :: Inventionen [Inventions]

The Korean composer Isang Yun, who died in 1995, was regarded throughout his life as the great mediator between the sound worlds of the Western avant-garde and Far Eastern music. Perhaps most striking is his unmistakable style in his wind works, which include a number of highly expressive pieces for oboe (s). In them, the Western listener encounters a foreign musical world, as Yun himself insistently described: For the European public, of course, music has a formal structure. The Asian music flows, it comes from itself and always remains the same. That's why I defined my music as a movement in the stillness. When you listen to Asian music, the same thing happens for two or three hours. Only when one observes closely one realizes that it is never exactly the same. There is always something differentiated, changed.

Unlike Bach's Inventions, where the title refers to a contrapuntally performed melodic invention, Yun's Inventions are each a characteristic play or sound technique.

In the first piece there are trills in all imaginable variants, in the second glissandi, ie free chromatic gliding through the tonal space. In the third piece the so-called suggestions, short notes in front of a main note, are presented in various forms: suggestions from two and three notes, later the simple suggestions, sometimes from above, sometimes from below, sometimes in second step to main note, sometimes in larger interval distance , Harmony , the title of the final movement, refers to the most varied forms of two-lengths: at the beginning parallel thirds, then sixths, later counter-movement at different intervals, at the very end then multiple sounds in both voices. Each of the about three-minute movements builds from the technical invention out to wide suspense, as they are typical for Yun's music.

Isang Yun adapted the Invention for two oboes in 1986 for two flutes and dedicated them to Rien de Reede and Thies Roorda